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Another detail revealed during last night’s Nintendo Direct is the upcoming launch of another spin-off Pokémon game for the 3DS.
Pokémon Link: Battle!, known in America as Pokémon Battle Trozei, is the 3DS sequel to the DS game Pokémon Link/Trozei, which featured match-three style puzzles using Pokémon faces. Battle! sees you doing the same, playing out match-3 style puzzles with Pokémon – but this time, the puzzles take the form of Pokémon battles that progress based on your performance in the game. Burst the right number and type of tiny Pokémon heads and you deal damage to your opponent.
Pokémon Link: Battle! will feature all known Pokémon from Generations 1 through to the present day Gen 6; and all of them will be “befriendable”. The game will launch on the 3DS eShop in the UK on 13 March.
Now Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Punch-Out!! among new titles to get the Remix treatment.
Remember NES Remix – the Wii U eShop Download that, as I put it at the time, “first remembers classic NES Titles… then screws with them”? After the surprise announcement and rapid release of the original game in December, perhaps it should come as no surprise that in a Nintendo Direct last night, Satoru Iwata once again surprised us by announcing its successor.
Like the previous title, NES Remix 2 takes another selection of classic NES games; and sets you specific challenges to complete in each, both using the original title’s gameplay and then in “altered” versions, where whole new twists are added to radically change the game you once knew. This time around, the titles focus on the later era of the NES, such as Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, Punch-Out!!, Kirby Adventure, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Metroid, among others. The game will also feature a new “Championship Mode”, which was left unexplained.
As well as being a game made up of mini-games from other games, NES Remix 2 is also going to include a full-length game in its own right, in the form of “Super Luigi Bros.” Super Luigi Bros. is a fully playable, reversed version of Super Mario Bros, where you now play as Luigi throughout and can take advantage of his higher jumping ability; and in a new right-to-left viewpoint instead of the classic left-to-right.
NES Remix 2 will hit the Wii U eShop on 25 April, price TBC.
Those of us paying attention to the snapshots Mojang have been releasing in the run up to the release of Minecraft 1.8 might have long since noticed a pattern to the additions to the game, an awful lot of it is centring around making building maps of different types easier to automate. Most of this seems to be because the way blocks are rendered among other things are being subtly fiddled with ‘behind-the-scenes’ in the run up to the implementation of the plugin API that Dinnerbone has been promising for a while, meaning a lack of ‘survival’ changes to the game.
Snapshot 14w07a is no different, although it does bring new iron trapdoors to the survival aspect of the game. Otherwise the majority of changes in this ‘smaller snapshot’ (Mojang’s words) centre once again around adding new ways to customise and set-up maps and mini-games for map-makers to use.
The two major map-making additions in my opinion are the ability to now display team objectives that can only be seen by the team it is for (filtered out by ‘team colour’) and the ability to at last switch off nameplates above a player’s head, using the teams function. That last one especially will have a major effect on Survival Game type maps equal almost to how Spectator Mode did back in snapshot 14w05a.
Other notable command additions have to do with the /scoreboard command added in the last patch, with some new subcommands /scoreboard operation and /scoreboard test, operation used for math-based functions such as totalling up all the kills from one team into one single score and test used to make sure that scores are falling between set parameters (e.g. not under 0 and not over 100).
Needless to say, 1.8 looks like it’s going to be a very good update for all map-makers in the Minecraft community.
Back in December EA told everyone that they were not going to work on any future projects or release any expansions or additional content for Battlefield 4 until they had sorted out the problems that continued to plague the game at that point.
Yesterday though they announced the upcoming release of a Battlefield 4 DLC, Naval Strike, coming at the end of March, hot on the heels of the Second Assault map pack being release on February 18th. As you can probably guess from the name, Naval Strike will add a lot of water-based craft and weaponry as battles are taken to the sea and will also add four new maps to the game: Lost Island, Nansha Strike, Wave Breaker, and Operation Mortar.
The problem seems to be that the reports of game crashes and players being randomly kicked from servers or even the entire game haven’t stopped. There are still people saying that doing certain actions, such as getting into a vehicle with another player is meaning that their playing of a game is stopped right there until they can reboot the game and rejoin the server. Some are even still reporting that they have a problem launching the game at all.
Back in December DICE general manager Karl Troedsson said that they had the “entire team working to stabilise the game” and that the reason they were working on Battlefield 4 before expanding it or concentrating on future projects was because “it’s the right thing to do.” and to be fair certain prominent bugs have been nipped in the bud already.
Hopefully the game will be a little more shipshape when the boats finally set out to sea.
